


Sugar Me Sweet

by popfly



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Baking, Birthday, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-17
Updated: 2012-07-17
Packaged: 2017-11-10 04:05:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/462026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/popfly/pseuds/popfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis bakes Harry a cake for his birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sugar Me Sweet

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [fr333bird](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fr333bird) for the inspiration and the beta, and Def Leppard for the title.

Standing in the baking aisle at Tesco, Louis feels almost as terrified as he did before his first X Factor audition. He looks down at the list in his hand, then at the rows and rows of boxes, bottles, and bags. He chews his lip, fiddles with his fringe, and calls his mum. Again.

She sounds fondly exasperated, holding back a laugh as she tells him, “Any brand of cooking chocolate will work, love. They all taste the same in the end.”

“But milk or dark? The recipe doesn’t say.”

“Well, what does Harry like best?”

“Milk, I think.” He grabs a package and puts it in the trolley.

“And you got both icing sugar and muscovado sugar?”

Louis checks for the fourth time, shoving aside the flour. “Yes. And the dark brown sugar for the icing.”

The nerves must be evident in his voice because his mum puts on her comforting voice. “He’s going to love it, Lou. You’ll do great, and if you want I can come down and help before we go to Anne’s - “

“No!” he cuts in, perhaps a little too loud for the supermarket if the look he gets from the elderly lady browsing the packaged mixes is anything to go by. His mum laughs down the phone and Louis ducks his head, pulling his beanie down lower over his ears. “You are exceedingly annoying,” he says, trying and failing to be gruff.

“I love you, darling. See you at Anne’s.”

 

Harry’s eighteenth birthday hadn’t been a total flop. Any birthday that culminated in truly spectacular sex Louis tallies in the win column, but Harry had spent a solid half an hour waxing poetic about his mother’s chocolate cake (“The caramel icing, Lou, honestly. Almost as good as sex.”) and Louis knew he was sad to not be home celebrating with his family. Louis had forgotten all about it until Anne texted him the last week of January: “bday dinner at ours Fri night, your mum Dan and girls invited as well xx”. Anne had sounded surprised when he called her - they usually texted or emailed unless she was already on the phone with Harry - and Louis had been nervous in a ridiculous way.

“Louis! Did you get my text?”

“I did, thanks for that. I’ll be there, of course. Probably drive up with Haz. I was just wondering, y’know that chocolate cake you make for Harry? With the caramel icing, yeah? I thought maybe I could … that is if you don’t mind giving me the recipe … maybe I could try my hand at it this year? Only last year he missed it so bad and I know it’s tradition for you to make it but … “ he trailed off, sheepish.

“Oh, Lou. I think he’d love if you made it for him.” She sounded sniffly in that way she always did when Louis was particularly kind to Harry, and Louis shuffled his feet. “One less thing for me to make, honestly. I’ll email you the recipe straight away.”

“Great! Excellent. Cheers.”

 

His Google search history looked like this:

“light muscavado sugar”  
“difference between plain flour and self raising flour”  
“how to butter and line cake tin”  
“electric whisk”  
“how to fold in flour”  
“how to sift icing sugar”

He watched thirteen YouTube videos of middle aged ladies in poorly lit kitchens, then gave in and called his mum.

 

Niall offers to get Harry out of the house during the day, and when they see it’s going to be unseasonably warm Niall suggests their first round of golf for the year.

Louis fakes a fuss, insisting Harry hit the snooze on his alarm and pressing him into the mattress when he tries to get up, holding him around the waist and nuzzling his neck. He says “one more kiss” three times before relenting, and he watches Harry pull on a long sleeved tee shirt and then a golf shirt, sliding a headband over his curls and then tugging on a cap.

“You don’t mind, really, right?” Harry hedges, pulling his shirt sleeves down over his hands.

“‘Course not, Haz. It’s so warm, and it’s your birthday. I may not share your love of the green but I understand. Get going or you’ll miss tee time or whatever it is you call it. You have to be back in time to shower and change before we drive up to HC.”

Harry bends down for a fourth and last kiss and grins against Louis’ mouth. “I’ll pay you back, yeah, when we get home.”

Louis wiggles his fingers as Harry heads out the door, waiting for the front door to click shut before throwing back the covers and leaping up.

Louis’s hidden all the obvious ingredients in the cupboards above the fridge, where they keep the fancy glasses they only use when their families visit. He pulls everything down now and lines it up on the counter.

He starts simple and preheats the oven. He’s glad he’s spent so much time in the kitchen with Harry, sitting on the counter and watching Harry chop and mix, turning from the island to the fridge to the range. Louis has always loved watching Harry cook, his long fingers on the handle of a knife or a saucepan. He’d brush Harry’s curls off his face if he couldn’t shake them off, so he wouldn’t have to stop what he was doing and wipe his hands on a towel.

Louis’ mum had told him to measure all his ingredients beforehand, so Louis gets out the scale and starts with the sugars.

He calls up the YouTube video he’d bookmarked with the title “butter and line cake tin” and hits play, then pauses it twenty two seconds in, as the lady is tracing the cake tin on parchment paper.

Louis figures this part shouldn’t be so bad, but his first tug of the parchment paper has the whole roll popping out of the cardboard box and skittering across the kitchen floor. He tears off the whole unrolled portion and shoves the paper tube back into the dispenser, pulling gently the second time and ripping off an appropriate, if uneven, length.

He cuts out his circle and moves on to buttering the tin. The lady in the video does it with her fingers, but Louis takes a bit of paper toweling and smears the butter around with that. He hates greasy fingers, made Harry switch brands of lube because of it, and figures as long as the entire tin is covered it doesn’t matter how it happened. The flouring bit is a little tricky, and he curses the video lady for making it look so easy when he winds up with more flour on himself than in the tin.

Next comes beating the butter and sugar, which isn’t bad thanks to having figured out which of Harry’s kitchen utensils is the electric whisk, googling the model number on the side, and reading the manual online. He manages to get the mixture looking as fluffy as his “mixing until fluffy” bookmarked video shows, with only a few splatters outside the bowl, and he’s able to get it off the side of the toaster and the backsplash with a quick swipe of the dishcloth.

 

He’s cracked eggs before, but he usually has to scrape shell out of the yolks when no one’s looking, and this time is no different. He is able to melt the chocolate without burning it (something his “melting the chocolate” video warned against multiple times), and pours it in the bowl with one hand while he works the mixer with his other. He’s feeling confident now, and grabs for the spatula so he can fold in the flour.

Louis decides that he and flour are not friends, and after the first few times he brings the spatula down too flat and ends up snorting flour, he leans back as far as he can and still reach the bowl, lowering the spatula at a snail’s pace and angling it just so. He’s so proud when the mixture starts actually looking like cake batter that he almost wants to call his mother.

He starts to pour the batter into the tin, and the first plop dislodges his carefully cut out parchment circle. He rights the bowl too quickly and the batter dribbles over the edge of the tin onto the countertop.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

He scoops the spilled batter up and drops it into the tin, and gets the rest of it in without incident. The cake tin goes in the oven and Louis breathes a sigh of relief, setting the timer and leaning against the counter for a moment.

He grabs for his phone and shoots off a text. _”Hope youre having fun, hit the ball hard. Or not if youre not supposed to xx”_

Louis figures the icing should be much easier, since it was basically just putting things in a saucepan and heating it until it thickened up to look like icing, so he pours himself a bowl of cereal and sits at the counter to eat it. His phone buzzes, a picture of Harry hunching his shoulders in the golf cart, giving the camera a thumbs up. He grins down at it and writes back, _“make Nialler get you a hot drink birthday boy!”_ , then leans over to click on the tab with the icing recipe.

 

His first batch of icing burns. He scrapes it out into the sink and starts over. The second batch burns. The timer is counting down on the oven, and his mother hadn’t needed to tell him that the icing had to cool down before it could be used.

When his third batch burns he presses the heels of his flour covered hands to his eyes and counts backwards from ten.

The cake is out of the oven and cooling before Louis feels calm enough to try the icing again, and he’s watched his “icing” video another five times. He puts evaporated milk in the saucepan, then icing sugar, then dark brown sugar, then vanilla. He turns up the heat on the range, and starts mixing.

He’s not sure if it’s his steadier mixing or his steady glare, but the fourth batch of icing turns out just right.

He’s had another text from Harry, a picture of Niall with a cocoa mustache, and writes back, _“good look for him, still at it?”_ He waits for a response while the icing cools, checking Twitter to see if anyone is stalking Harry and Niall at the golf course (they are), and texting his mom and Anne a progress report.

The original recipe calls for the cake to be sliced in half horizontally so that a layer of icing can be spread in the middle, and Louis wants it to be just like Anne makes it, so he gets out the knife he’s seen Harry use on the bread he brings back from his old bakery and presses one palm against the soft top of the cake. He takes a deep breath and starts to cut, sawing as gently as he can.

He gets about halfway through when the top part of the cake splits in two.

 

Louis is sitting on the floor of the kitchen when the front door opens, and he is beyond caring. Harry calls out, “I’m home,” and Louis can hear him kicking off his shoes, the clunk-clunk of them hitting the floor, and he still doesn’t get up.

“Lou?”

He’s worn out, his shoulders tense, and he’s frustrated, and the cake is done but it’s not quite like a cake is supposed to look when done, and no amount of Dr. Oetker Shimmer Sugar could cover that up.

“Louis?” Harry comes into the kitchen and his eyes go wide, taking in the messy counter and Louis on the floor. “What is all this?”

Louis leans his head back against the cupboard door and sighs wearily. “I baked you a cake. The chocolate one with the caramel icing, your mum’s cake.” He waves a hand upwards. “It didn’t quite turn out the way I’d hoped.”

Harry’s looking from the counter down to Louis and back up again. “You baked my mum’s cake. For me?”

Louis nods, his hair catching on the cupboard hinges. “For you. It’s a mess, but it’s for you.”

Harry kneels down next to Louis and reaches out to run his fingers along Louis’ jaw. “You’re covered in icing sugar, mate.”

“And self-raising flour, I’m sure.” Louis leans into the touch, feeling a little misty and embarrassed. “I wanted to do it myself but I’m not much of a baker I fear. Actually I smashed that bit in comparison to the icing bit, if I’m honest. The icing burnt, and then I split the cake top when I was slicing it, and then I tried to glue it back together with icing, but as you can see that didn’t quite work out. I hoped to hide the mess in an avalanche of shimmer sugar, but I didn’t quite succeed.”

Harry is still staring at him, brushing his fingers up and down Louis’ face. He leans forward and licks what must be icing sugar from next to Louis’ mouth, then gets to his feet and pulls Louis up with him.

Louis watches Harry inspect the cake, with its one drooping side and extra-thick layer of icing in the middle and the over-generous dusting of shimmer sugar, and Harry’s mouth curls up.

“Babe, it’s the best cake I’ve ever seen.”

Louis laughs, nudging Harry’s side with his elbow. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious, Louis. It’s beautiful. I love it.”

Louis feels that tightening in his chest that happens whenever Harry turns that smile on him, and shakes his head. “You’re a right tit if you think that cake is beautiful,” he says, but he’s grinning and lets Harry pull him in for a hug.

“I can’t believe you baked my mum’s cake for me,” Harry mumbles into Louis’ hair, sliding his hands up under Louis’ shirt, his fingers still a little chilled.

“Well, you missed it so much last year. She sent me the recipe. I had to watch a jillion YouTube videos and read the manual for the electric whisk.”

Harry laughs against Louis’ neck, pressing a kiss there. “I can’t wait to eat it. But first I’d very much like to lick every bit of sugar and flour and icing off of you, if that’s alright with you.”

Louis grins and tilts his head to give Harry more leeway. “I didn’t realize I’d got anything on my neck.”

“Oh yeah, it’s practically covered in sugar.”

 

The cake almost falls apart when they press candles into it later, and they sing super fast so Harry can blow them out before it collapses. Anne serves it up in chunks, not pieces, and asks Harry what he wished for.

“Didn’t make one, mum. Don’t need to wish,” he says, catching Louis’ hand across the table. They eat their cake like that, and everyone says it’s delicious.


End file.
